Monday, April 20, 2009

Predictions about Sun's products after Oracle aquires it

Prediction 1MySQL : Initially 'the database expert' company buying MySQL will look promising. However, soon this company (Oracle) will start offering MySQL enterprise edition and force customers to buy only Enterprise edition. This will create lot of noise in the FSF world (as it will violate the GPL license). Since, open source community of MySQL is huge, there will be fork of MySQL in the open source world.Actual MySQL will eventually be dead because of lack of support from Oracle. However its forked re-incarnation will continue to live and flourish (different name).Summary : MySQL will live and keep evolving under different name

Prediction 2:Glassfish: Oracle will now own three major Java Enterprise Servers (OC4J, Weblogic and Glassfish). Oracle is currently consolidating their OC4J and Weblogic product lines. It is phasing out OC4J and forcing customers to migrate the Weblogic. As far as Glassfish is concerned, Oracle will fire most engineers from Glassfish development team. The Glassfish will still live because Oracle will still need to develop an RI that demonstrates the latest and greatest of JavaEE. However, it will no longer be a production quality software. The open source community of Glassfish is not big enough to keep it alive so Glassfish will not live more than 2 years.Eventually Apache Gernimo will be used as latest and greatest RI of JavaEE.Summary : Glassfish may live for few years (may be 2) but in form of non-usable, non-production quality RI

Prediction 3:Solaris: Will continue to live and evolve but more in form of Proprietary Operating System

Prediction 4:VirtualBox: Will be forked. Oracle will also continue the development but its basic version will be available as Free software (not an open source software). Eventually Oracle's version and Open source version will differ significantly.

Prediction 5:Sparc Chip : I don't know. Can go in any direction

Prediction 6:Open Office : It will live and flourish. However, Oracle's contribution will be mostly limited to the development for StarOffice rather than for OpenOffice.There will be better marketing and sale of StarOffice. You will see more products like SharePoint that integrate enterprise Document management into StarOffice. StarOffice will shine. (So will OpenOffice since more people will be using it)

Prediction 7:Java: The innovation in Java will slowdown significantly will be business driven rather than technological driven. Oracle will not share the idea of Sun that Java should be everywhere (big server to smallest possible devices). As a result more and more people will migrate the Microsoft's .Net or some other platform.

Prediction 8:Java mobile (and FX) : Innovation will cease. Because of lack of innovation, the platform will become deprecated and eventually die.

Prediction 9:Overall Java Adaption: Will decrease. It will mostly be limited to Server side Platform (and SOA)

Prediction 10:Netbeans : Will continue to live. Oracle will migrate its JDeveloper to use NetBeans platform.